Online advertisements are created with the goal of having the advertisements viewed, listened to, or otherwise received by a target audience. The target audience may be, for example, one or more users with a set of particular interests or one or more users falling into a particular demographic or psychographic group. However, distributing such advertisements to the desired audience is a difficult process. It is often difficult for brand managers, ad networks, publishers, advertisers, and/or advertising agencies (collectively referred to herein as “advertisers”) to control and manage the service of their advertisements.
For example, online advertisements allow the publishers of well-viewed websites to derive a profit from their web traffic. To do this, these website publishers can place an advertisement tag on their webpages, which causes the webpage to load additional content that is delivered by an advertisement network. Such an advertisement tag includes an advertisement as well as code that records or otherwise detects the viewer's interaction with a particular webpage. In return, the website publisher can be compensated by the advertisement network as viewers view the advertisement and/or interact with the advertisement.
With the advent of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablet computing devices, a unique media environment for reaching viewers has been created. As such, rich media display advertising in mobile software applications and from mobile web browsing applications has become increasingly popular. For example, in some cases, advertisements are requested from a mobile web browsing application in response to the mobile web browsing application user accessing a web page. In another example, mobile application developers frequently incorporate functionality into their applications that allows such advertisements to be served within the mobile software application to the application users.
As advertising budgets shift to accommodate the rapid growth of mobile advertising, there is a requirement for advertisers, such as brand managers and advertising agencies, to monitor and verify the amount that has been spent in this mobile environment. This, however, has proved to be a difficult task as mobile software applications present unique challenges with regard to verification. Thus, there is therefore a need in the art for approaches for distinguishing between advertisement requests or other traffic from mobile software applications and advertisement requests or other traffic from mobile web browsing applications.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide methods, systems, and media that overcome these and other deficiencies in the prior art.